The sclite tool assumes that one particular sort of the data is interesting -- sorting by the "speaker" of the waveform. This is not necessarily the most interesting sort -- and it's certainly not the only interesting sort. This tool provides the ability to sort by whatever sort key you're interested in, not the "speaker".

The sort should be transparent to the user.

Parsing text data is not really that hard in Perl, but why should more than one person figure all this out? This will allow other researchers to easily use the sclite tool with results from any format -- they need only solve the problem of extracting the text appropriately.